Potager Community Garden

We’re delighted to have received the news that the National Lottery Community Fund has made an award that will allow us to develop, run and evaluate a new programme of Social and Therapeutic Horticulture at Potager.

We’ll be making a start with some additional training from Thrive – the gardening for health charity.

Gardening is a wonderfully flexible medium that can transform lives and Thrive sees first-hand how gardening can help everyone, regardless of age or disability.

Social and therapeutic horticulture uses the garden as a safe and secure place to develop someone’s ability to mix socially, make friends and learn practical skills that will help them to be more independent.

Using gardening tasks and the garden itself, Thrive’s STH Practitioners build a set of activities for each gardener to improve their particular health needs and to work on certain goals they want to achieve.

The benefits of a sustained and active interest in gardening include:

• Better physical health through exercise and learning how to use or strengthen muscles to improve mobility
• Improved mental health through a sense of purpose and achievement
• The opportunity to connect with others – reducing feelings of isolation or exclusion
• Acquiring new skills to improve the chances of finding employment
• Just feeling better for being outside, in touch with nature and in the ‘great outdoors’

thrive.org.uk 2024

In our experience, ‘lunch’ is a very important part of the gardening day and we’re looking at ways to incorporate harvesting, preparing and cooking food together in groups – learning new skills and providing the all important opportunity to sit around the table together.

If you’d like to keep in touch as the project progresses, please add your details to our Potager Community Garden Newsletter.